Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Nine hundred and thirty one contemporary philosophers took part in a recent survey. The word "philosopher" in this context means a member of a university department of philosophy. The 99 departments involved were generally Anglophonic and analytic in history/orientation.  So ... given some commonality in education, profession, language, historic lineage ... has there come to be a consensus on the Big Questions?  Not really. But the particulars of that answer are fascinating. I’ll just select the ten questions on their survey that have given my mind the most solicitude over the years, and tell you what the survey results say, and only then answer those for myself: 1.       Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? Accept or lean toward Platonism                    366 (39.3%) Accept or lean toward nominalism     ...

So: what is the philosophical significance of the Kant-Laplace hypothesis, otherwise known as the "nebular hypothesis," which nowadays rules the roost of origin-of-solar-system views? In chronology, by the way, Kant was way ahead of Laplace, although Laplace gets his name on the theory due to his more analytical, mathematical treatment of the subject. And I've just put Laplace's picture in here. Now, is there any worthwhile connection we may draw between Kant the astronomer and Kant the philosopher? I think there is. The nebular hypothesis is a blow (how serious a blow I leave to the reader's own intuition, but surely some sort of a blow) to the single most psychologically powerful argument for the existence of a Providential, supernatural Being -- the argument from design. After all, the solar system, with its marvellous equilibrium and its subtle but overwhelming predictability, is Exhibit A for the designedness of the universe, is it not? Yet Kant's...

The Kant-Laplace hypothesis, IIRC, is the view that our solar system was at one point a vast disc-shaped cloud of dust, and that it gradually condensed into the several orbiting planets and the central star with which we are familiar. The theory appears in "The Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens," pictured here, a pamphlet published in 1755. Here's the full text in English: http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/kant/kant2e.htm Kant is of course better known for his Critical Philosophy, the great critiques that redefined epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. He didn't even begin producing those great works until more than 20 years after he wrote the above pamphlet. Kant, in a well known moment of self praise, said that he was producing philosophy's analog to the Copernican revolution. The praise has been much ridiculed, and I admit to my mind it seems perverse, since Kant's philosophy might at least as plausibly be seen as anti-Copernican, as...

The Federal Lawyer will soon run a review of mine of GAME OVER, a memoiristic account of the crisis of Greek debt in the period 2009-2011, when the book's author, George Papaconstantinou, was finance minister. I won't steal my own thunder by going over the material of that review here. Instead, I'll simply mention this: my birthday plays a prominent part. Specifically, my 52d birthday -- October 18, 2010. So pardon me a flashback Friday. In October 2010, French and German officials met each other in the seaside resort town of Deauville, in the Normandy region of France. They discussed Greece. The two countries involved in the summit were until that time taking somewhat different positions, but each wanted to present a common front. So, as Papaconstantinou (who wasn't there) reconstructs it -- On October 18th ... Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel -- both clad in raincoats -- went strolling on the famous Deauville promenade. In the culmination of months of behi...

In some discussions of the logic of induction, one runs into a paradox of the ravens, otherwise known as Hempel's paradox, in recognition of philosopher Carl Gustav Hempel. I'd like to run through it now, if only in an attempt to keep my mind nimble. Hempel asks us to consider the hypothesis (1) all ravens are black. Now, we naturally think that if we can justify this proposition as a matter of induction, we can do so by looking at a lot of ravens, to see if all of them that we can find are black. But we surely don't look at apples, to see if they are some color other than black (say, red or green). Because we implicitly but strongly believe (2) observations of non-ravens are not relevant to verifying a generalization about the look of ravens. But ... Hempel's paradox challenges (2). After all, (1) would seem to be the logical equivalent of (3) All non-black items are non-ravens. So: whenever I see a green apple, I see a non-black item that is a non-raven. Wh...

When the US was obsessing about the then-still-not-exactly President Trump and his tweets about Congressman John Lewis, I tuned it out, and tuned in instead to the politics of the Mother Country. The Bank of England's Governor Mark Carney on Jan. 15 said that the country's consumer spending has held up well since the Brexit referendum, a fact that seems to have surprised him. Consumers are "entirely looking through Brexit-related uncertainties." Stiff upper lips and all that? More important, Prime Minister May gave an important address about the direction her government will take in executing the UK's exit from the EU. There have been talk of a so-called "soft Brexit," which would presumably entail retaining many of the benefits of membership in the EU while throwing off the liabilities. The leaders of other European nations had made clear their displeasure at that idea, and there developed a consensus that it wasn't going to happen. May ackn...

Those Apollo moon rocks continue to yield grist for the mill of science. A new UCLA study re-jiggers estimates of the age of our satellite, increasing her estimated age by 100 million years or so. When I was in school the dominant theory was that the moon and the earth emerged at the same time. Presumably the one cloud of dust that congealed to become a planet somehow congealed in a bi-modal way to become both planet and satellite. But recent work has brought another view into prominence.  The earth is at least 4.5 billion years old. The moon is somewhat younger, perhaps about 4 billion years old. When the moon formed, the earth was considerably more solid than a dust cloud, but a good deal more molten than the Earth we know. This premise leads to creative theorizing about how that happened. The dominant theory at the moment is that the moon formed as the consequence of a collision between the earth and something else, a "planetary embryo" called Theia about 4 bill...